ically opened and read and made a spring for
the car.

The message was from Port Costa, barely thirty miles away, and briefly
said: "Any your men missing? Soldier left car here believed jumped
overboard return trip ferry-boat."

One man was missing. Recruit Foster, for whom a commission as lieutenant
and signal officer was waiting at department head-quarters, could not be
found.

CHAPTER IV.

In the busy week that followed Lieutenant Stuyvesant had his full share
of work and no time for social distraction. Appointed to the staff of
General Vinton, with orders to sail without delay for Manila, the young
officer found his hours from morn till late at night almost too short
for the duties demanded of him.

The transports were almost ready. The troops had been designated for the
expedition. The supplies were being hurried aboard. The general had his
men all the livelong day at the rifle-ranges or drill-grounds, for most
of the brigade were raw volunteers who had been rushed to the point of
rendezvous with scant equipment and with less instruction. The camps
were thronged with men in all manner of motley as to dress and no little
variety as to dialect. Few of the newly appointed officers in the
Department of Supply were versed in their duties, and the young regulars
of the staff of the commanding general were working sixteen hours out of
the twenty-four, coaching their comrades of the volunteers.

The streets were crowded with citizens eager to welcome and applaud the
arriving troops. Hotels were thronged. Restaurants were doing a thriving
business, for the army ration did not too soon commend itself in its
simplicity to the stomachs of some thousands of young fellows who had
known better diet if no better days, many of their number having left
luxurious homes and surroundings and easy salaries to shoulder a musket
for three dollars a week.

Private soldiers in blue flannel shirts were learning to stand attention
and touch their caps to young men in shoulder-straps whom they had
laughed at and called "tin soldiers" a year agone because they belonged
to the militia--a thing most of the gilded youth in many of our Western
cities seemed to scorn as beneath them.

In the wave of patriotic wrath and fervor that swept the land when the
Maine was done to death in Havana Harbor, many and many a youth who has
sneered at the State Guardsmen learned to wish that he too had given
time and honest effort to the school of